Why Use Dropbox As Your Documents Folder?

MacGroup’s Terry White, like many of us an avowed Dropbox.com fan, says he uses Dropbox daily to sync files and to share files with others. White says that after initially signing up for Dropbox’s free service, he liked how well it worked so much he decided it was worth paying for so he went with a 100GB plan.

White, who has a MacBook Pro for work and a MacBook Air for personal use and non-work travel says he’s had always hesitated against having two computers because he knew the day would come when he’d be frustrated that a document I wanted to work on was on the other Mac left behind. However, with his 100 GB Dropbox account, he’s have enough space to use his Dropbox folder as my “Documents” folder, so that whenever he was working on a project and saved it to Documents folder inside my Dropbox Folder it would automatically be synced to the Dropbox cloud AND more importantly to any of his other Macs signed in to the same Dropbox account.

White has now upgraded again from 100GB to 200GB (plus all the free space he’s accumulated for referring people and says he still couldn’t be happier with this solution, which not only gives him access to his documents on all of his Macs, but also can access from my iPhone or iPad as well as a web browser on any connected device.

I pretty much use Dropbox the same way, with my Dropbox folder displacing my Documents Folder and other folders as default repository for work-in-progress and files I might want to reference. I’m still getting along fine with the free service, which is up to 8GB or so thanks to Dropbox’s referral dividend. That’s ample for synching work on three Macs and my iPad, but as the Cloud matures, I can see the advantages of having all of one’s data stored and accessible with Dropbox, although I can’t imagine ever not keeping regularly updated and redundant backups on local media.

White also explains that with Dropbox he doesn’t migrate any more. For years whenever he’d get a new Mac he’d migrate from the old Mac to the new one, a great feature of Mac OS, but with the downside being that you accumulate a lot of old junk on your drive. With Dropbox, he’s switched to doing “clean” installs, keeping his data files on Dropbox in the cloud regaining tons of disc space and enhancing system stability.